Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/115

Rh are names enough once clerical. The very fairest names on our little hill of the Muses are of men once clergymen. Channing is the only one in this country who continued thus to the end of life. A crowd of able men, with a mob of others, press into all departments of trade, into the profession of the law, and the headlong race of American politics,—where a reputation is gained without a virtue or lost without a crime,—but no men of first-rate powers and attainments continue in the pulpit. Hence we have strong-minded men in business, in politics, and law, who teach men the measures which seem to suit the evanescent interests of the day, but few in pulpits, to teach men the eternal principles of justice, which really suit the present and also the everlasting interests of mankind. Hence no popular and deadly sin of the nation gets well rebuked by the Church of the Times. The dwarfs of the pulpit hide their diminished heads before the Anakim of politics and trade. The almighty dollar hunts wisdom, justice, and philanthropy out of the American Church. It is only among the fanatical Mormons that the ablest men teach in the name of God.

The same is mainly true of all Christendom. The Church which in her productive period had an Origen, a Chrysostom, an Augustine, a Jerome, an Aquinas, its Gregories and its Basils, had real saints and willing martyrs, in the nineteenth century cannot show a single mind which is a guide of the age. The great philosophers of Europe are for enough from Christian.

It is, doubtless, a present misfortune that the positions most favourable to religious influence are filled with feeble men, or such as care little for the welfare of mankind,—who have all of religion except its truth, its justice, its philanthropy, and its faith. Still, such is the fact just now; a fact which shows plainly enough the position of what is popularly called " Christianity " in the world of men. The form of religion first proclaimed by the greatest religious genius that ever lit the world, and sealed by his martyrdom, is now officially represented by men of vulgar talents, of vulgar aspirations,—to be rich, respectable, and fat,—and of vulgar lives. Hunkers of the Church claim exclusively to represent the martyr of the Cross. A sad sight!